Shared topic: Relationships within Azeroth

This is my first time doing a shared topic. If I did shared topics all the time, I would write “as usual, I’m using this shared topic as a starting point but am totally going to derail.” Since I’ve never done a shared topic before I can’t say that. But I’ll derail anyway.

So “Relationships within Azeroth”, courtesy of Naithin from Tank’n’Tree.

As your friendly local amateur anthropologist, I jumped on this topic. I had this great informative post planned out to help the many people I’ve run into in WoW who were experiencing a common confusion. It was all about how to tell the different between eHarmony and WoW. Unfortunately for people who don’t actually play WoW but use it exclusively to flirt with the opposite gender everywhere, I decided to quit my beloved guild of two years and moved on to a guild that seemed to better fit what I want out of the game. So instead of an lovely, not snarky at all, educational article, you get a sappy post about getting attached to guildies.

Around my family, I’m not allowed to refer to people I know online as “friends”. “They’re not friends, they’re epals” my mother says. I don’t talk to my family all that often, but I’ve been careful to use the term “people I game with”. But are the people I game with friends? I don’t know them very well. I know bits of their personality – whether they’re fast or slow learners, perfectionist or not, quiet or loud. Some of them, I know about parts of their life, I know what they do for a living, I hear funny stories about their kids. And I care when something great or something bad happens to them. After all, these are the people I hear on vent night after night as we fight dragons and sometimes each other. When I was an officer, I’d run down to the library on my breaks to toss some emails back and forth with the other officers. Day after day. For so many hours in our lives, we laughed together, worked out strategies together and cheered each other up when our strategies didn’t work as expected. Whether I really knew them or not, I got attached.

When I said goodbye, I tried to do it the right way, being all polite and offering to pay back anything I owed them. I said we could stay friends. All those things I do at the end of a romantic relationship. OMG I broke up with my guild!

While I knew it was time to move on, I couldn’t stop the memories from playing in my head:
My first raid.
When I was learning to play a paladin and my class leader asked me what stats I was looking for to which I answered “spirit”.
The first time I got through Lurker without being killed by the spout.
The first time I got pissed off that others were STILL dying to spout on Lurker.
When we had a naked dance party in Magtheridon’s Lair for an hour because one of our healers went offline and we had no replacement.
Our drunken Kara nights.
When our warlock put me on ignore for pugging a heroic and I then went out of my way to make sure he died at every opportunity.
My first BG.
Our awful Arena teams (“dead before you are” and “5 dead guys”).
When we celebrated my birthday in Mount Hyjal.
When one of our priests decided she’d teach me to tank in Shadow Labs. In my healing gear.
When I discovered you could ride in the robots on the way to Mimiron (I bet those who were there that night still have my squeals of glee ringing in their heads)

And those are just some in-game ones. Meeting face to face with some of my Azeroth “epals” was also very memorable. For those of you who’ve never met an online friend before, here’s what it’s like: you have a stranger in front of you, that you’ve never seen before in your life. Then out of that stranger’s body comes a familiar voice. That voice talks about familiar things with a familiar train of thought. It’s the weirdest and coolest experience ever.

Less pleasant, but fortunately much rarer, memories occurred too, however, in retrospec, most of the conflicts that happened seem so silly.

Are the relationships within Azeroth different from real life ones? Yes. I find my online friendships to be much more “in my head”, if that makes any sense. Imagination and personal perception have a larger role than in my offline friendships which are more “in my face”. I do much more overanalysing of my online frienships and I get way more anxious about them because there’s so much left to the imagination. But some things are the same. The same personality traits bug me online and offline and the personality traits that I admire are the same as well. I care about my friend’s happiness and sadness the same whether they’re online or offline. I’m just as sensitive to rejection in the online world as I am in the real world. And I can have the same amount of fun with an online friend as I can with an offline friend (however I *do* need to mix it up, too much online sends my imagination into overdrive and too much offline exhausts me!).

As I say my tearful goodbyes to my guild, I’m filled with mixed feelings. On one hand, I’m excited to meet new people and have a refreshing environment. On the other, I’m reminded of the good times, of the caring, of the laughter. I feel bad for letting down those who tried so hard to keep me happy. I even cried a few times yesterday. Yes, cried for probably losing touch with people in a video game. I’m a huge sap, but it’s ok, I’m sure some people still love me anyway.

That’s the story of my relationships within Azeroth. Tune in next time for something a bit less introspective and awkwardly personal.

20 Comments on “Shared topic: Relationships within Azeroth”

I have had my ups and downs with people in wow – still have them – arguing with an ex guildy about ” I’ll never get to play with you again so it doesnt matter” and I’m not willing to lose the friendship – but its going to take effort, logging in at the same time everyweek together makes maintaining an online relationship easy. When that changes – you need to find other ways of communicating. I think regardless of if your a ‘social’ or not – make the effort to stay in contact with the ones who matter and it won’t be all the guild – and I think if you can do that with some people then they blur the line between epals and start crossing over as friends.

Yeah, I hope I can do that with the people I’m closer to. I’m terrible at keeping in touch, but maybe keeping a blog might help keep communication going a little, give us something to talk about. My last night with the guild ended badly, though, my “goodbye party” expectations were too high and I was deeply disappointed. On the bright side, after how awful tonight was, I really don’t feel so bad about leaving anymore.

I remember that night. I don’t think I actually d/cd. I just went and ate dinner. SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

I think staying friends is one of those really difficult things that I haven’t even managed to do yet, IRL. Without the same vested interest in doing something together, all we have to keep us in contact are our sparkling personalities, and leftover neural connections that fire of X amount of dopamine/opiates/oxytocin, if you really want to get down to it. Have lots of fun with your new guild + keep writing! I’ll be reading.

Thanks! I bookmarked your writings too,so we’ll be able to keep in touch somewhat! I’m just like you though, even IRL, if I don’t regularly do something with someone, its hard to keep things going. I’ll probably move Elo to WN’s guild if they’re ok with it. I’ll log in once in awhile for 5 man/BG fun.

As for what happened, things didn’t go the way I would have liked but we’ll leave it at that. Life goes on and at least this way I have no second thoughts.

As for the other gquit that night, I think it was just coincidence. Some huge flashy drama would have been exciting but it was disturbingly quiet.

We did not have enough on to do a 25 man and many did not want to do Old World content, so we started looking at 10 man run into something – which you were included in. I’m sorry that didn’t meet your expectations of a big sendoff but at that point I think you had built it up too much in your own mind of what was going to happen.

There was only one other gquit last night and no it wasn’t related. It was somewhat expected as it wasn’t great fit with him wanting to be a little more hardcore than what we are aiming for.

Right location, wrong desk Rykga. If you paid any attention to anyone else you would know that there are two people in this company in the guild, One was a former hunter who now only has a alt who admittedly i vent to alot.

Edited. I think you’re lying, but still, two wrongs don’t make a right. Thanks for calling me on it.
And I didn’t track down your company (I don’t even know what your company is), you’re just the only person I know who writes like that.

Technically you may have gotten rainbows and unicorns as the former happens after storms and the latter has a very pointy weapon; unicorns may be “horny” for virgins but not in a good way. Oh, there will be blood. :)

I’m sad to see you go Ry but I understand it. Just thought I’d let you know that you made me a better pally. Really and truly. Heck, I probably wouldn’t have rolled a pally without the inspiration of you or Jorelis. I wish I’d be there Tues, I for one would’ve gladly spent a couple hours with you whomping on the old school content.

Thanks :) I appreciate it. Be glad you weren’t there Tuesday, it was unpleasant.

I wish we would have had a chance to talk about pally stuff in a less stressful setting. I’m much more laid back outside of raids.

I’ll miss you a lot, you always had something funny and cheerful to say. Make sure you add Eloise to your friends list! Hopefully sometime in the near future a few of us will all be on at the same time and not raiding. We’ll be able to go have some laughs in the old world.

[…] on this topic I started to wonder what I really thought and felt about this topic. Looking over BossyPally and RaidLeader there are points I agree with and want to expand on and I want to throw in my own […]

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